NEW DELHI: An article written by Seymour M Hersh in the New Yorker throws light
on Pakistan sharing sophisticated technology and warhead-design information
with North Korea. According to the report, in June 2002, four months before
the current crisis over North Korea became public, CIA had delivered a comprehensive
analysis of North Korea's nuclear ambitions to President George W Bush and his
top advisers.

The document, known as a National Intelligence Estimate, was classified as
Top Secret SCI (sensitive department information), and its distribution within
the government was tightly restricted.

The CIA report made the case that North Korea had been violating international
law - and agreements with South Korea and the US - by secretly obtaining the
means to produce weapons-grade uranium.

The document's most politically sensitive information, however, was about Pakistan.
Since 1997, the CIA said, Pakistan had been sharing sophisticated technology,
warhead-design information, and weapons-testing data with the Pyongyang regime.

Pakistan, one of Bush administration's important allies in the war against
terrorism, was helping North Korea build the bomb.

In 1985, North Korea had signed the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which
led to the opening of most of its nuclear sites to international inspection.

By the early 1990s it became evident to American intelligence agencies and
international inspectors that the North Koreans were reprocessing more spent
fuel than they had declared, and might have separated enough plutonium, a reactor
by-product, to fabricate one or two nuclear weapons.

The resulting diplomatic crisis was resolved when North Korea's leader, Kim
Jong-Il, entered into an agreement with the Clinton administration to stop the
nuclear-weapons programme in return for economic aid and the construction of
two light-water nuclear reactors that would generate electricity.

Within three years, however, North Korea had begun using a second method to
acquire fissile material. This time, instead of using spent fuel, scientists
were trying to produce weapons-grade uranium from natural uranium, with Pakistani
technology.

One American intelligence official, referring to the CIA report, said: "It
points a clear finger at the Pakistanis. The technical stuff is crystal clear,
not hedged and not ambivalent."

Referring to North Korea's plutonium project in the early 1990s, he said: "Before,
they were sneaking...", now "it's off the wall. We know they can do
a lot more and a lot more quickly."

North Korea is economically isolated; one of its main sources of export income
is arms sales, and its most sought after products are missiles. One of its customers
has been Pakistan, which has a nuclear arsenal of its own but needs the missiles
to more effectively deliver the warheads to the interior of India.

In 1997, according to the CIA report, Pakistan began paying for missile systems
from North Korea in part by sharing its nuclear weapons secrets.

According to the report, Pakistan sent prototypes of high-speed centrifuge
machines to North Korea. And sometime in 2001 North Korean scientists began
to enrich uranium in significant quantities. Pakistan also provided data on
how to build and test a uranium-triggered nuclear weapon, the CIA report said.

It had taken Pakistan a decade of experimentation, and a substantial financial
investment, before it was able to produce reliable centrifuges; with Pakistan's
help, the North Koreans had "chopped many years off" the development
process, the intelligence official noted.

It is not known how many centrifuges are now being operated in North Korea
or where the facilities are. (They are assumed to be in underground caves.)
The Pakistani centrifuges, the official said, were slim cylinders, roughly six
feet in height, that could be shipped "by the hundreds" in cargo planes.

But, he added, "all Pakistan would have to do is give the North Koreans
the blueprints. They are very sophisticated in their engineering." And
with a few thousand centrifuges, he said, "North Korea could have enough
fissile material to manufacture two or three warheads a year, with something
left over to sell."

A former senior Pakistani official told me that his government's contacts with
North Korea increased dramatically in 1997; the Pakistani economy had foundered,
and there was "no more money" to pay for North Korean missile support,
so the Pakistani government began paying for missiles by providing "some
of the know-how and the specifics."

Pakistan helped North Korea conduct a series of "cold tests," simulated
nuclear explosions using natural uranium, which are necessary to determine whether
a nuclear device will detonate properly.

Pakistan also gave the North Korean intelligence service advice on how to fly
under the radar, that is, how to hide nuclear research from American satellites
and US and South Korean intelligence agents.

Whether North Korea had actually begun to build warheads was not known at the
time of the 1994 crisis and was still not known today, according to the CIA
report. Those who have read the report said that it included separate and contradictory
estimates from the CIA, the Pentagon, the State Department, and the Department
of Energy regarding the number of warheads that North Korea might have been
capable of making, and provided no consensus on whether or not the Pyongyang
regime was actually producing them.

Over the years, there have been sporadic reports of North Korea's contacts
with Pakistan, most of them concerning missile sales. Much less has been known
about nuclear ties. In the past decade, American intelligence tracked at least
13 visits to North Korea made by A Q Khan, who was then the director of a Pakistani
weapons-research laboratory, and who is known as the father of the Pakistani
nuclear bomb.

This October, after news of the uranium programme came out, the Times ran a
story suggesting that Pakistan was a possible supplier of centrifuges to North
Korea. General Pervez Musharraf, attacked the account as "absolutely baseless,"
and added, "there is no such thing as collaboration with North Korea in
the nuclear area."

The White House appeared to take Musharraf's statement at face value. In November,
Secretary of State Colin Powell told reporters that he had been assured by Musharraf
that Pakistan was not currently engaging in any nuclear transactions with North
Korea.

"I have made clear to him that any... contact between Pakistan and North
Korea we believe would be improper, inappropriate, and would have consequences,"
Powell said. "President Musharraf understands the seriousness of the issue."

After that, Pakistan quickly faded from press coverage of the North Korea story.
The Bush Administration may have few good options with regard to Pakistan, given
the country's role in the war on terror.

Within two weeks of September 11, Bush lifted the sanctions that had been imposed
on Pakistan because of its nuclear-weapons activities. American disarmament
experts felt that the sanctions had in any case failed to deal with one troubling
issue: the close ties between some scientists working for the Pakistan Atomic
Energy Commission and radical Islamic groups.

"There is an awful lot of al-Qaeda sympathy within Pakistan's nuclear
programme," an intelligence official said. One American non-proliferation
expert said, "right now, the most dangerous country in the world is Pakistan.
If we're incinerated next week, it'll be because of HEU (highly enriched uranium)
that was given to the al-Qaeda by Pakistan."

Pakistan's relative poverty could pose additional risks. In early January,
a Web-based Pakistani-exile newspaper opposed to the Musharraf government reported
that in the past six years, nine nuclear scientists had emigrated from Pakistan
- apparently in search of better pay - and could not be located.

An American intelligence official called Pakistan's behaviour the "worst
nightmare" of the international arms-control community: a Third World country
becoming an instrument of proliferation.

"The West's primary control of nuclear proliferation was based on technology
denial and diplomacy," the official said. "Our fear was, first, that
a Third World country would develop nuclear weapons indigenously; and, second,
that it would then provide the technology to other countries. This is profound.
It changes the world."

Pakistan's nuclear programme flourished in the 1980s, at a time when its military
and intelligence forces were working closely with the US to repel the Soviet
invasion of Afghanistan.

The official said, "the transfer of enrichment technology by Pakistan
is a direct outgrowth of the failure of the US to deal with the Pakistani programme
when we could have done so. We've lost control."

The CIA report remained unpublicised throughout the summer and early fall,
as the administration concentrated on laying the groundwork for a war with Iraq.
Many officials in the administration's own arms-control offices were unaware
of the report.

"It was held very tightly," an official said, adding "compartmentalisation
is used to protect sensitive sources who can get killed if their information
is made known, but it's also used for controlling sensitive information for
political reasons."

One American non-proliferation expert said that given the findings in the June
report, he was dismayed that the administration had not made the information
available.

"It's important to convey to the American people that the North Korean
situation presented us with an enormous military and political crisis,"
he said. "This goes to the heart of North Asian security, to the future
of Japan and South Korea, and to the future of the broader issue of non-proliferation."

A Japanese diplomat, who has been closely involved in Korean affairs, defended
the Bush administration's delay in publicly dealing with the crisis. Referring
to the report, he said, "if the intelligence assessment was correct, you
have to think of the implications. Disclosure of information is not always instant.
You need some time to assess the content."

He added, "to have a dialogue, you really have to find the right time
and the right conditions. So far, President Bush has done the right thing, from
our perspective."

President Bush's contempt for the North Korean government is well known, and
makes the White House's failure to publicise the CIA report or act on it all
the more puzzling. In his State of the Union address in January, 2002, Bush
cited North Korea, along with Iraq and Iran, as part of the "axis of evil."

Bob Woodward, in Bush at War, his book about the administration's response
to September 11, recalls an interview at the President's Texas ranch in August:
"'I loathe Kim Jong-Il!' Bush shouted, waving his finger in the air. 'I've
got a visceral reaction to this guy, because he is starving his people.'"
Woodward wrote that the President had become so emotional while speaking about
Kim Jong-Il that "I thought he might jump up."

The Bush administration was put on notice about North Korea even before it
received the CIA report. In January 2002, John Bolton, the under-secretary of
state for arms control, declared that North Korea had a covert nuclear-weapons
programme and was in violation of the non-proliferation treaty.

In February, the President was urged by three members of Congress to withhold
support for the two reactors promised to North Korea on the ground that the
Pyongyang government was said to be operating a secret processing site "for
the enrichment of uranium."

In May, Bolton again accused North Korea of failing to co-operate with the
International Atomic Energy Agency, the group responsible for monitoring treaty
compliance.

Nevertheless, on July 5, the President's national-security adviser, Condoleezza
Rice, who presumably had received the CIA report weeks earlier, made it clear
in a letter to the Congressmen that the Bush administration would continue providing
North Korea with shipments of heavy fuel oil and nuclear technology for the
two promised energy-generating reactors.

The Administration's fitful North Korea policy, with its mixture of anger and
seeming complacency, is in many ways a consequence of its unrelenting focus
on Iraq. Late last year, the White House released a national-security-strategy
paper authorising the military "to detect and destroy an adversary's WMD
(weapons of mass destruction) assets before these weapons are used."

The document argued that the armed forces "must have the capability to
defend against WMD-armed adversaries... because deterrence may not succeed."
Logically, the new strategy should have applied first to North Korea, whose
nuclear-weapons programme remains far more advanced than Iraq's.

The administration's goal, however, was to mobilise public opinion for an invasion
of Iraq. One American intelligence official said, "the Bush doctrine says
MAD (mutual assured destruction) will not work for these rogue nations, and,
therefore, we have to preempt if negotiations don't work. And the Bush people
knew that the North Koreans had already reinvigorated their programmes and were
more dangerous than Iraq. But they didn't tell anyone. They have bankrupted
their own policy, thus far, by not doing what their doctrine calls for."

Iraq's military capacity has been vitiated by its defeat in the Gulf War and
years of inspections, but North Korea is one of the most militarised nations
in the world, with more than 40 per cent of its population under arms.

Its artillery is especially fearsome: more than 10,000 guns, along with 2,500
rocket launchers capable of launching 500,000 shells an hour, are positioned
within range of Seoul, the capital of South Korea.

The Pentagon has estimated that all-out war would result in more than a million
military and civilian casualties, including as many as a 100,000 Americans killed.
A Clinton administration official recalled attending a congressional briefing
in the mid-nineties at which Army General Gary Luck, the commander of US forces
in Korea, laconically said, "Senator, I could win this one for you - but
not right away."

In early October, James A Kelly, assistant secretary of state for East Asian
and Pacific affairs, flew to Pyongyang with a large entourage for a showdown
over the uranium-enrichment programme. The agenda was, inevitably, shaped by
officials' awareness of the President's strong personal views.

"There was a huge fight over whether to give the North Koreans an ultimatum
or to negotiate," one American expert on Korea said. "Which is the
same fight they're having now."

Kelly was authorised to tell the Koreans that the US had learned about the
illicit uranium programme, but his careful instructions left him no room to
negotiate. His scripted message was blunt: North Korea must stop the programme
before any negotiations could take place.

"This is a sad tale of bureaucracy," another American expert said.
"The script Kelly had was written in the NSC (National Security Council)
by hardliners. I don't think the President wanted a crisis at this time."

The CIA report had predicted that North Korea, if confronted with the evidence,
would not risk an open break with the 1994 agreement and would do nothing to
violate the non-proliferation treaty. "It was dead wrong," an intelligence
officer said, adding "I hope there are other people in the agency who understand
the North Koreans better than the people who wrote this."

"The Koreans were stunned," a Japanese diplomat who spoke to some
of the participants said. "They didn't know that the US knew what it knew."
After an all-night caucus in Pyongyang, Kang Suk Ju, the first vice foreign
minister of North Korea, seemed to confirm the charge when he responded by insisting
upon his nation's right to develop nuclear weapons.

What he did not talk about was whether it actually had any. Kang Suk Ju also
accused the US, the Japanese diplomat said, of "threatening North Korea's
survival."

Kang then produced a list of the US' alleged failures to meet its own obligations
under the 1994 agreement, and offered to shut down the enrichment programme
in return for an American promise not to attack and a commitment to normalise
relations. Kelly, constrained by his instructions, could only re-state his brief:
the North Koreans must act first. The impasse was on.

But, as with the June CIA report, the administration kept quiet about the Pyongyang
admission. It did not inform the public until October 16, five days after Congress
voted to authorise military force against Iraq.

Even then, according to administration sources quoted in the Washington Post,
the administration went public only after learning that the North Korean admission
- with obvious implications for the debate on Iraq - was being leaked to the
press.

On the CBS programme Face the Nation on October 20, Condoleezza Rice denied
that news of the Kelly meeting had been deliberately withheld until after the
vote. President Bush, she said, simply had not been presented with options until
October 15. "What was surprising to us was not that there was a programme,"
Rice said. "What was surprising to us was that the North Koreans admitted
there was a programme."

"Did we want them to deny it?" a former American intelligence expert
on North Korea asked. He said, "I could never understand what was going
on with the North Korea policy."

Referring to relations between the intelligence service and the Bush Administration,
he said, "we couldn't get people's attention, and, even if we could, they
never had a sensible approach. The administration was deeply, viciously ideological."

It was contemptuous not only of the Pyongyang government but of earlier efforts
by the Clinton White House to address the problem of nuclear proliferation -
a problem that could only get worse if Washington ignored it.

The former intelligence official said, "when it came time to confront
North Korea, we had no plan, no contact, nothing to negotiate with. You have
to be in constant diplomatic contact, so you can engage and be in the strongest
position to solve the problem. But we let it all fall apart."

The former intelligence official added, referring to the confrontation in North
Korea in October, "the Kelly meeting and the subsequent American statement
have tipped the balance in Pyongyang. The North Koreans were already terrifically
suspicious of the US . They saw the Kelly message as 'When you fix this, get
back to us.' They were very angry. That, plus the fact that they feel they are
next in line after Iraq, made them believe they had to act very quickly to protect
themselves."

The result was that in October, as in June, the administration had no option
except to deny that there was a crisis. When the first published reports of
the Kelly meeting appeared, a White House spokesman said that the President
found it to be "troubling, sobering news."

Rice repeatedly emphasised that North Korea and Iraq were separate cases. "Saddam
Hussein is in a category by himself," Rice said on ABC's Nightline. One
arms-control official said, "the White House didn't want to deal with a
second crisis."

In the following months, the American policy alternated between tough talk
in public - vows that the administration wouldn't be "blackmailed,"
or even meet with North Korean leaders - and private efforts, through third
parties, to open an indirect line of communication with Pyongyang.

North Korea, meanwhile, expelled international inspectors, renounced the non-proliferation
treaty, and threatened to once again begin reprocessing spent nuclear fuel -
all the while insisting on direct talks with the Bush administration.

One Clinton administration official who was involved in the 1994 talks with
Kim Jong-Il acknowledged that he felt deeply disappointed by the North Korean
actions.

"The deal was that we'd give them two reactors and they, in turn, have
to knock off this shit," he said. "They've got something going, and
it's in violation of the deal."

Nonetheless, the official said, the Bush administration "has got to talk
to Kim Jong-Il." Despite the breakdown of the 1994 agreement, and despite
the evidence of cheating, the CIA report depicted the agreement as a success
insofar as over the past eight years it had prevented North Korea from building
warheads - as many as 100, according to some estimates.

Last week, President Bush gave in to what many of his advisers saw as the inevitable
and agreed to consider renewed American aid in return for a commitment by North
Korea to abandon its nuclear programme.

However, the White House was still resisting direct negotiations with the Kim
Jong-Il government. In a speech in June, Robert Gallucci, a diplomat who was
put in charge of negotiating the 1994 agreement with Pyongyang, and who is now
dean of the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, recalled that
Bush's first approach to North Korea had been to make it "a poster child"
for the administration's arguments for a missile defense system.

"This was the cutting edge of the threat against which we were planning
and shaping our defense," he said. "There was a belief that North
Korea was not to be dealt with by negotiation."

"But then September 11 happened, and September 11 meant that national
missile defense could not defend America, because the threat was going to come
not from missiles but from a hundred other ways as well," he said. "And
so we've come full circle... North Korea and other rogue states who threaten
us with weapons of mass destruction threaten not only because they themselves
might not be deterrable but because they may transfer this capability to those
who can't be deterred or defended against."

One American intelligence official who has attended recent White House meetings
cautioned against relying on the day-to-day administration statements that emphasise
a quick settlement of the dispute.

The public talk of compromise is being matched by much private talk of high-level
vindication.

"Bush and Cheney want that guy's (Kim Jong-Il) on a platter. Don't be
distracted by all this talk about negotiations. There will be negotiations,
but they have a plan, and they are going to get this guy after Iraq. He's their
version of Hitler," he said.